


1.4 Ga – 65 Ma

by RobinTrigue



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Corn - Freeform, Decompression Sickness, Gen, Kayfabe Compliant, Late Devonian Extinction Event
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-21 01:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10675074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinTrigue/pseuds/RobinTrigue
Summary: An account of Brock’s rise out of the darkness and into the green.





	1.4 Ga – 65 Ma

It was not known when he came into existence; only that he did, like so many other things. He stood swaying among the charnia, pale and dead and blind. Thousands of meters deep, it was outside time, outside space. It was nothingness, forever.

Then, with tumult and fire, Pannotia rose. Brock Lesnar crawled onto dry land, gasping and naked. For the first time his eyes saw the light, and it burned them. The air was thin and filled his lungs like so much cruelty. The sun’s rays beat down on his skin, twisting and electrifying it. And all around him there were earthquakes and there was magma, thunderous roaring and blistering pain.

Brock clung to the dark and sizzling basalt. He cut his hands open on chert shards. He hurt, from skin to bone, a sensation that he had never known before – that nothing had ever known before. His blood boiled in his veins, not having the ocean to hold it down. His muscles crumpled under the weight of the sky, heavier than anything he had ever known. He lay on the hard rock, aching and panting.

As he endured this brave new world, eyes shut tight against the glare, Brock’s fingers brushed something as soft. He opened his eyes.

Thin and delicate, like cobweb, a mat of green was spreading around him. It was thin, almost as thin as air, crushed under the weight of blood droplets that fell from Brock’s palm. But it was there.

Brock stood up and began to walk. He did so with difficulty; the wind bit at him relentlessly, and the white and grey pillows of stone rendered his feet tough and calloused. He struggled against the pounding of gravity, arriving finally to the crashing waves of his ancestral home – and hesitated.

He looked down.

What was under his feet now was thick, springy. Its depth gave it an even richer green than the gossamer strands. He stood a moment on the living cushion, watching as the sea spray sparkled on its surface like so many crystals.

The earth was kind, he realised. It was granting him this softness, this nurture. Brock did not want to leave it. It was good. It was where he belonged.

He spent many, many days walking the shoreline after that, climbing over spurs of rock down to slippery sand to follow the line of green. It was a world of fascination: here, life was soft like fur. There, it was rubbery with small disks overlapping one another like gentle scales. On the shadowy side of this rock were slow-spreading patches, identical in texture to the rhyolite around it but a vibrant yellow in colour. One day he found a plant that stood above the rest – nearly as tall as his thumb was wide. He plucked it delicately between two fingernails and held it up to eye level.

The tubes of the plant were a gentle blue-green, branching decidedly out from one another. Brock lifted his other hand, holding it beside the plant. In the bright sunlight, the blue-green of his arteries was clearly visible as they split and wound around his tendons. He smiled. They were kin.

Then he lowered both hands. He had not until now had much reason to look up, but now he lifted his eyes towards the hills, and saw there something extraordinary – thick vegetation, bright and waist-high, no, higher!

He ran towards it, breathless with delight, mind empty of everything other than that he had to keep running, keep moving through these plains of brown and green, not be stalled by storms or floodplains, and then he came to them. A grove of trees.

They towered above him, soared. They cast shadows when there was not a cloud in the sky. A single frond dropped from one, moving slowly on the breeze: it was broad and flat like a sword, frills reminding him of a place from long, long ago. Brock breathed deep, for the first time in his life he breathed truly deep, filling his lungs in the shade of the branches.

By his feet, a root shot out, scrabbling over the rock face. Brock watched in fascination as it cast about wildly and found a small crack in the ground, split by years of rain.

“Yes...” he whispered, though there was no one around to hear it. “Yes!”

The root plunged down, straining to go further. Brock threw himself to his knees beside it, jamming his fingers into the stone and lifting with all his might, muscles finally going to some good use as he pried the boulder from the earth. There was a creaking and crumbling sound as the root made use of its new space, splitting and expanding and splitting again as the tree anchored itself more firmly into the ground. In the air, Brock could smell it: the tree’s exhale, its sigh of relief. The trees were saying to their saplings, _we are breaking the way for you._

Brock walked peacefully between broad trunks and through narrow streams. The humid earth cooled, as if from so much shade. Streams that had been shallow and lazy began to deepen, organising themselves around the trees the way everything should. The deep water was sweet, so to stand in its rushing felt new to Brock. He stared up at the trees above him, higher than ten of himself, higher than twenty: they were the first cathedrals, and they filled him with gratitude and awe. They breathed loudly and deeply, running sap through veins as wide as his body. It was like the earth’s heart pumping.

Brock paid no mind to the squat creatures that waddled among them: he killed one, out of curiosity, and its blood ran out like lava. He cast its limp body aside after that. He had no use for such things. Of slightly more interest were the scuttling arthropods that trimmed at the tree fronds, like dutiful gardeners. Brock welcomed them as siblings in his great garden, bursting with fertility.

Brock didn’t notice the seas turning green and sickly. He didn’t notice the fish that washed up dead on the shores after his thriving trees hungrily sucked up the rain. He did notice, one day, a small pebble on the ground that was not a rock at all. Laying it in his palm, he felt a quickening of life inside: a seed! An entire plant, scaled down to a mere fleck of life, enormous potential small enough to hold!

And then, fire crashed down ahead of him. And behind him. And all around him there was the screaming and cracking of dry wood. The small, waddling creatures squealed as they fled. The air filled with ashes that piled thick upon the ground as the forests burned, and Brock, in terror, curled up and let himself be buried.

When Brock awoke, he had missed the first snowfall of his life. He had missed the first chill he would have felt since being clutched by the ocean’s depths, the first true cold so much deeper than the coldness of night time. And had this been described to him, he may not even have believed it: the description would have been purgatory, and he had awoken in paradise.

The air itself was green. For every tree he had lost forever, there were ten more in its place. And there were so many _more_ than he had ever known there could be – trees with rough bark like the back of a scorpion, trees with smooth bark, trees that were wider than Brock’s entire body, trees that were skinnier than his arm and lived by winding their way up other trunks until they reached the canopy.

A pair of dragon flies danced around his head, together as large as he was, and Brock laughed. He laughed for the first time, tears filling his eyes from the joy of it. The charred, red rocks that sunlight dripped onto weren’t the norm at all: they disappeared into the leaf litter, and below that, into the soil. The deep, rich soil which Brock was able to dig in for hours without ever finding the bottom. He found instead earthworms, their colour and function identical to his own, and roots, and wispy tendrils attaching the roots in one giant, living web.

The soil and the trees sang a song of themselves, passing information rapidly back and forth, sharing life and health faster than Brock could keep up. All he could do was watch and celebrate it. Wind blew through the treetops, shaking insects on their perches, and Brock pushed through the scrub and brambles to begin his wandering once again.

He smiled more, for every day brought something new. One morning, he found a tree stacked with shelves like miniature cliff faces – fungi, breaking it down. Now death was no longer the end for Brock’s plants; these friends could break them down and rebuild them anew. On another day, he came to a place where the light was yellower and the air was cooler and drier. There he discovered plants with leaves broad and flat like a sliced lung. And yet another day, trees that were shaggy with thin leaves, like brittle grasses that hung down from the sky. The days felt longer than before, as though happiness itself could extend the time between each sunrise.

Brock wandered far and wide, bewitched by the earth’s bounty, by the soft feel of the soil and by the gentle caress of the creatures that crawled through it. Rivers continued to run sedately around Brock’s plants, long since tamed to their will. Mountains bloomed with rich foliage. Great beasts, tall as the sky, marched around him with thunderous trumpeting. Brock paid them no mind. He walked through the quiet humming places, the rustling places, the warm and humid places where life was new every day. Then one day, he saw it: a flash of something he had never seen before, white like the cleanest bone. When he touched it, it bruised yellow and transparent.

He sat back on his haunches and waited.

After time, a new form burst out: pink. Then another, orange. Then violet. He cradled the delicate artefact in his palm. Soon the sky clouded over with dust and ash, choking and poisoning the air. There was death and burial, like the world was sinking once again beneath the waves and out of existence.

But this time, Brock cradled in his hands a flower. A gift. A speck of brightness in the poring dark.

**Author's Note:**

> All credit goes to [Sanidine](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine) for giving me the image of Brock Lesnar enjoying the Carboniferous


End file.
